Neville Goddard Audio Lecture: Two Thieves

About This Lecture

"Two Thieves" is a brief excerpt rather than a full-length lecture, distilling one of Neville Goddard's recurring crucifixion teachings into a single vivid image. In it he interprets the two thieves crucified on either side of Christ not as historical criminals sharing his fate but as the two states of mind that perpetually steal from a person: the past and the future. Between them hangs the present moment, the place Neville regards as the only point of genuine creative power, the one location in time where imagination can actually do its work.

The past robs you, in his reading, by drawing your attention backward into regret, memory, and the endless rehearsal of former conditions, so that you re-create yesterday by dwelling in it. The future robs you in the opposite direction, pulling attention forward into anxiety, anticipation, and the quiet habit of deferring your desire to some later time when conditions will supposedly be right. Both thieves accomplish the same theft, distracting you from the living present, the one place where the assumption of the wish fulfilled can actually be made and felt as real. While you are robbed in either direction, the treasure of now lies unguarded.

Neville's practical instruction follows directly from the image: recognize these thieves for what they are and refuse to let them carry off the present. To create consciously, you must occupy the now—assuming and feeling the reality of your desire in the present tense rather than locating it in what once was or in what might someday be. The desired state is not remembered and not awaited; it is entered and inhabited at this moment. The crucifixion imagery becomes a striking reminder that the saving work, the crucifixion of an old state and the birth of a new one, happens in the immediate moment of awareness and nowhere else.

The teaching belongs to a larger pattern in Neville's reading of the crucifixion, where the figures around the cross are understood as inner states rather than bystanders at a historical execution. The thieves are not incidental detail but essential to the meaning: they flank the central figure precisely because the central figure represents the present, the awareness of being that is forever pressed between the two robbers of time. Seen this way, the scene is not a tragedy that happened once but a daily occurrence in the mind of anyone who lets attention slip away from now, and the cross becomes the meeting place of past, present, and future within a single consciousness.

Because this is a short clip, it functions as a concentrated meditation on presence and assumption rather than as a developed exposition with extended scripture and argument. Its value lies precisely in its memorability: a single picture that a listener can carry through the day, guarding the present against the two thieves of past and future. Neville often paired this image with Paul's insistence that "now is the accepted time," reminding his hearers that salvation is never a matter of yesterday's record or tomorrow's hope but of the immediate, available moment. To apply it is to catch yourself the instant attention drifts into regret or worry, and to return deliberately to the present, occupying the feeling of the wish fulfilled here and now, where alone the imagination does its creative work and the true treasure can be claimed.

Key Scripture

Neville grounds this lecture in Luke 23:32-33, 2 Corinthians 6:2.